cloning

The cloning process is cut down into steps. First, you take a cell from an animal or human. Then you grow it into an embryo of 100 cells. The third thing that you do is remove genes from cells. Lastly, you put in new genes of whatever you wish to make.

There is a cloning controversy. The question is: Is an embryo of 100 cells a human life?One answer is yes it is a human life, and destroying it is the same as killing. The other answer is no, it doesn’t have characteristics of life, it only has the potential. I'm not totally sure about what I think.

Reproductive Cloning is a copy of an animal, a human and even a plant.

In 1997 the first mammal was cloned. It was a sheep named Dolly. It took 227 attempts to try and create dolly and only one success. Dolly was suffering from premature aging and arthritis.

In 2001 there was the first cloned human. It was only 6 cells.

Building a Better Chicken
Black Feathered chickens grow fast and they are very meaty. The problem is that they do not lay enough eggs. The White feathered chickens lay lots of eggs. They highjacked an egg from a white feathered chicken. They injected cells from a black feathered chicken. They produced a chimera, which is one animal composed of two different cell lines. The chicks were colour coded. If there was more black fur on the chick it would be meatier.

In 1999 people set out to clone a Gower. It was too rare to take eggs from and they didn’t want to take the chance. They took a cow egg and replaced the genes with a Gower’s genes. The embryo was planted into the cow. Nine months later, the Gower was born. Unfortunately, two days later, the Gower became ill from a bacterial infection. The Gower died one day later.

Therapeutic Cloning is creating body parts, organs, and tissues. We can use Therapeutic Cloning to treat diseases such as parkinsonism, diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

Andrea Gordon is a woman of twenty-eight years of age. She had her blood pressure checked and it was 210 over 109. The normal one is 120 over 80. She had a kidney failure. She needs a kidney by forty. She got a kidney from her Aunt Donna. They were a tissue match. The kidney worked. She had to take immunosuppressant drugs which had poor side effects. Two years and eight months later Andrea had an ear infection. To fight the ear infection, she had to stop taking the drugs that she needed to take. Her body rejected the kidney. She had dialyses 5 times a day, seven days a week. She is hoping for a cloned kidney to help her.

They tested a miniature cloned kidney under a cow’s skin. The kidney cells were 3 months old. The kidney produced urine and it was not rejected.

PPL therapeutics is cloning pigs. What they need to do is remove the gene that produces the sugar that coats the heart. They implant 150 single cells into the genetically modified embryos. About five of them come to term. We are getting one step closer to having pigs’ organs acceptable to humans.

Cloning is becoming more and more intense and we are getting closer and closer to being able to clone completely without any mistakes. Cloning is in the near future.